I was using my AWS Free Tier account for a college project that utilizes a single instance of AWS S3 and RDS services. I was conscious of the free tier limits and being charged for exceeding the limits so I read everything carefully related to free tier limits on RDS and S3.
For RDS it is:-
750 hours of Amazon RDS Single-AZ db.t2.micro, db.t3.micro, and db.t4g.micro Instances usage running MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL databases each month. If running more than one instance, usage is aggregated across instance classes.
750 hours of Amazon RDS Single-AZ db.t2.micro Instance usage running SQL Server (running SQL Server Express Edition) each month.
20 GB of General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage per month.
Free backup storage up to 100% of the total provisioned storage size of your active DB instances for a region.*
Here is my service usage and the respective cost.
As we can see the usage quantity was only 617 hrs which is very much under the free tier limits and even for the Virtual Private Cloud. I don't understand why was I charged for the VPC?
Am I missing something
RDS Free Tier Charge
Free Tier RDS has been charged
amazon web services - AWS RDS free tier: Is free usage reset every month? - Stack Overflow
Charged for Backup Storage on RDS Free Tier
Videos
From the AWS documentation:
750 hours of Amazon RDS Single-AZ db.t2.micro Instance usage running MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle BYOL or SQL Server (running SQL Server Express Edition) – enough hours to run a DB Instance continuously each month
so if you run two instances, that will be a total of 1500 hours of usage, so you will be charged extra. But you can run one instance for free each month. Note that the RDS instance is part of the 12 months free tier in AWS. That means that this offer only holds for 12 months after creation of your AWS account.
I created an AWS account and use it for several years now. Now, I was experimenting with the RDS instance (free tier) and this started to change me.
So, I believe that the free tier is only free within 12 months of the AWS account creation.
CHECK DAILY THE AWS ACCOUNT, I had another mistake earlier that cost me $300 for that.
Two possible reasons come to mind:
- The region / AZ you're trying doesn't have any t2.micro RDS instances available. Try a different AZ or different region. us-east-1 is usually a good bet
- It could be that the free tier offering hasn't kept up with the RDS instance availability. Nothing you can do about this.
Adding to Tim's Answer.
It could also be the DB Engine Version.
For example, for SQL Server.
- SQL Server 2019 and up, the DB instance class db.t2.micro is unavailable.
- SQL Server 2017 and below, the DB instance class db.t2.micro is available.
Try switching to SQL Server 2017.